Tag: MIT

If you're getting bored of Kinect videos, this ought to bring you back around! In this video (also after the break), MIT demonstrates just how close we are to Minority Report user interfaces. MIT shows that the Kinect camera, along with the recently-released libfreenect driver, is capable of incredible object resolution. Not only is each of the user's hands recognized, but the fingers and ...

Our friends at Engadget just reported on a revolutionary new optometry app from MIT that lets you analyze your vision using an Android phone. It uses a small box to refract the image from a smartphone screen and makes adjustments until you can see it perfectly, just like the eye doctor did with that expensive equipment last time you visited. Here's the thing, though: this app isn't expensive. It ...

Following on from a New Scientist article that was written a few days ago, I ended up on the website of Taeg Sang Cho -- a graduate student at MIT. He's been working on a bunch of advanced imaging algorithms -- with gifts and grants from big names like Microsoft, Adobe and Google. His recent work -- three research papers -- is all about content-aware manipulation of photos. I'm struggling to ...

You can hack many things... but music? Really? I know that technology plays a big part in music mixing in a synths sense -- but as a procedural, Python-scripted way... that's news to me! Enter The Swinger, which was coded last week at the Music Hack Day event in San Francisco. It makes music swing: it abuses the time-stretching capabilities of Echo Nest's open-source Remix SDK to create ...

To say that Microsoft and Novell have a muddy history when it comes to open-source projects and the GPL would be an understatement. Things were looking up, with the release of the open-source implementation of Silverlight, Moonlight 2, last week, but today things took a turn for the worse: Novell has just cut all the open source code from MonoDevelop. The implications of this aren't ...

Several news sources have started reporting on a 2007 research project by a group of MIT students who found they could accurately predict Facebook users' sexual preferences based on the people they were friends with. The project, referred to as "Gaydar," sampled data from 1,600 men (only 33 of whom were out as gay on Facebook) to create an algorithm that supposedly predicts whether a user is gay ...

Personas is a fascinating piece of web-based art that visually represents just how much the internet knows about you. Type in your name, and Personas will analyze the text of the Google results, breaking your web presence down into various categories. These groupings include everything from "online" to "sports" to "illegal," and each one has a color, so each person's name results in a unique ...

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art ...

YouTube is fine for videos of kittens dancing and celebrities make drunken fools of themselves. But sometimes you want something a bit... geekier. MIT has launched MIT TechTV, a video sharing site for the university's community. You need an MIT email address to upload videos, but anybody can view or share movies from the site. The videos are powered by blip.tv and cover a range of subjects from ...

Last week the folks over at Creative Commons released version 3.0 of their licensing suite for user-generated content. The bulk of the changes center around clarifying the existing licenses, and addressing the growing internationalization of Creative Commons content. With 3.0 also comes a compatibility structure that will allow them to identify and certify other licenses as CC BY-SA (Attribution ...